The MySQL native driver for PHP is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 5 and PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or newer. It is a replacement for libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. From now on you can use ext/mysqli either together with libmysql as you did in the past or with mysqlnd. The MySQL native driver for PHP can connect to MySQL Servers 4.1 or newer.

As stated before, we have no plans to remove libmysql support from ext/mysqli, which would break existing applications.

Changes

The 5.0.1-beta release covers the functionality of the libmysql beside some functions that are marked as experimental in the ext/mysqli documentation. The following additions have been implemented since the release of 5.0.0-alpha: